Visitor Rises

Evgeny Kissin appears to be an unwilling visitor to recording studios these days and offers for this double album live performances of Beethoven taped at six different venues over the decade from 2006 to 2016. Expect the varying acoustic properties of the halls to be a factor in your listening, plus balances of piano sound produced – as the booklet says – ‘under various technical conditions’. Less easy to tolerate is the amount of audience noise, intruding at the beginning of several tracks and at its worst in the Appassionata.

And though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death… Almost five years after their sixth long-player "Sovran", DRACONIAN once again cast their breathtaking veil of melancholy over the world. This second full-length release featuring singer Heike Langhans delivers a captivating mélange of dreary doom and contrasty vocals and mixes Heike's angelic female voice with Anders Jakobsson's death growls. The one-hour long album, graced with haunting cover artwork by Natalia Drepina, is carrying the legacy of gothic doom metal à la My Dying Bride or Trees Of Eternity into the new decade and will drag the listener into a sorrowful cosmos right with the first notes of the spellbinding opener "Sorrow Of Sophia" that interweaves beauty with crippling depression. After crushing slow rhythms and the fragile "Sleepwalkers" that leads through barren soundscapes, the band - founded in Säffle / Sweden in 1994 – rises up to their best in the nine-minute long "Ascend Into Darkness", which will echo in the listener's ears long after the final chord has died away.